It began at 3 o’clock in the afternoon yesterday and stretched on well past midnight after musician Wyclef had left the stage. Sony transformed Sixdegrees, a nightclub here in Toronto, into its launch headquarters with red-tinted fountains and PlayStation 3 interactives loaded with games, from Resistance: Fall of Man, a WWII/Sci-Fi shooter expected to be the top-selling game for the system, to Madden NFL which spent most of the night untouched here in hockey country.

For most of the members of the press invited this was their very first chance to actually play the system as Sony’s supply of the consoles arrived so closely to launch there was no opportunity for the video game giant to offer many previews. Reporters from across the country had flown in to take advantage of what was to become a ten hour marathon, pulling up chairs and plunking themselves down in front of their chosen game for as long as they could.

As one of the few people who did get to play with the system previously, I opted to allow others to snatch up the coveted chairs and actually enjoyed watching Monsieur Net, host of Quebec’s most-popular technology show, expertly play through a third of Resistance, running through underground tunnels and through military compounds, shooting his way through waves of strange-looking aliens with cooling tanks on their backs. It’s a game that pretends that WWII was interrupted by an alien invasion and so our troops turn their resources to battling extraterrestrials instead of the Axis.

The game is one of the few that actually displays any sign of the PlayStation 3’s promised power, with large-scale battle scenes filled to the pixel, not just with swarms of animated characters, but complex smoke, explosion, and gunfire effects. One trick that I saw several people play around with is the way the game handles broken windows. For the first time ever in a game, you can shoot a window and watch it break in sections, complete with a spider-trace pattern of cracks, calculated perfectly to match the physics of the impact and trajectory of the bullet. Up until now, if you shot a window, it either shattered completely or in pre-programmed parts.

Beyond that, it was very difficult to be blown away by what was there. Some games, like Mobile Suit Gundam, a Japanese game of battling 40-story robots, suffered visibly from choppy animation and slow-down while both racing titles Need For Speed: Carbon and Ridge Racer 7 showed pronounced aliasing, an effect where lines that should be smooth instead appear to be made up of little stair-steps. It’s an effect that was a problem in the original PlayStation and it was my hope would have disappeared by this third generation.

The consensus from those I talked to at the event was unanimous across the board, that the experience of playing the PlayStation 3 was “good, but not up to expectations”, that for those who return to their writing desks or their editing suites to report on the PlayStation will have a difficult time justifying all the hype around it. And, like myself, everyone was quick to qualify their impressions by saying that what we were looking at were just the launch titles for the system, the very first attempts to create a game for a new system and that it will be later next year that we will see the first games to really impress.

David Wu, head of Pseudo Interactive, the Toronto-based company behind the Full Auto series explained to me that part of the issue is that many designers including himself had less time than usual to produce their games. For Full Auto 2, a game where players drive stylish cars mounted with guns and wild weapons to hunt each other to destruction while bending time, his company had just nine months to create the game, the least amount of time they have ever faced.

The other issue Wu pointed out is that with any video game company where the plan is to make versions of their game for the Xbox 360 and/or Nintendo Wii in addition to the PlayStation 3, the tendency is design it from the beginning with all three systems in mind, so you’re less likely to create the PlayStation 3 version to take full advantage of its Cell processor. The result are games that are comparable in quality between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

15 of the 21 launch titles for the PlayStation 3 are also currently available for the Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii.

That’s not to say that there are not some clear improvements in games that are cross-platform. Amongst the titles I’ve played on the Xbox 360 that were there for the PlayStation 3, such as Call of Duty 3 and Need For Speed: Carbon, I noticed a smoother animation and more fluid action, especially on the more complicated scenes involving multiples characters and effects.

Call of Duty 3 is the game I played to experience Sony’s “Sixaxis” feature. Gone now is the vibrating rumble of the controllers of PlayStations past and in its place is a movement-sensitive control where you can perform actions just by physically tilting the controller itself, either forward or backwards or side-to-side. It’s a poor version of the physical control that Nintendo’s Wii offers, which is more sophisticated, more intuitive, and more enjoyable.

There’s a sequence in Call of Duty 3 where your soldier gets locked into a wrestle-to-the-death tussle with a German soldier and in order to get through it you have to rapidly move the controller from side-to-side. It’s a brief moment in the game, but well done as the fight moves across the room, out a window, and dramatically onto the streets.

The latest Tony Hawk game let’s you change the controls so that your character keeps his/her balance on the skateboard using the motion control, even using it to perform grabs and various tricks. The Activision representative I spoke to, the game’s publisher, told me that although he preferred to use the regular controls for precision, when playing the game casually and just skating about the urban parks with no goal in mind, the Sixaxis controls made it easier to be laid back and more enjoyable.

Other games on display included Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, Genji:Day of the Blade, a Japanese sword-fighting game, NHL 2K7, NBA 2K7, and Fight Night: Round 3.

Montreal-based publisher Ubi Soft had flown down with a copy of their WWII aerial combat game Blazing Angels to showcase, only to discover that Sony didn’t have the production version of the PlayStation 3 needed to play the game (the Debug PS3) and so was left just talking about it instead.

The night ended with a performance by Wyclef Jean, best known as a member of The Fugees and now praised as the man to successfully bring reggae into the gangsta rap world, adding a hint of Bob Marley social awareness. In his opening greetings for the night he managed a rap that rhymed “Haitian” with “PlayStation” and reminded Sony he expected a free one after the show.